Pianist and Birder Kai Frueh talks in depth about his immersive Bird Concert coming up in Lincoln City on July 10

    I got a chance to do some birding and talk about music with Kai Frueh, who is presenting the final concert in his Bird Concert Tour this Friday night, July 10 at the Lincoln City Cultural Center at 7pm.  We met in Corvallis and drove to the nearby William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, where we birded several spots, took some photos and recordings, and spoke in-depth about the program.  He also helped me get 5 Benton County lifers. (For those of you who aren't birders, a 'lifer' is a bird that one has never before seen or heard in one's life. So a 'county lifer' is a bird one has never before seen or heard in a particular county. Yes, it's a thing.)

Kai recording birds. Photo: Lorin Wilkerson

NWR: Right, so yeah, cool. Looks like it's recording. It's Kai Frueh here  at... Where are we at now? [Editor’s Note: His name rhymes with “Fly Free.”  Also, All birds referenced in this interview are linked to at eBird, where you can view photos and listen to their vocalizations by clicking on the big green "Listen" button.]

KF:  [We're at] Prairie Overlook at William L Finley National Wildlife Refuge. Excellent. And we're looking for…whatever's here. Listening as much as anything, which is what a lot of birders love to do.

NWR: Yeah, that's what we do, right? So I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is…birds, birds and music. It sort of seems like a no-brainer for birding musicians, you've been very in tune with both birds and music since you were really young.

KF: I've been playing piano since I was seven. Um, I started after my brother-- my brother [Ben] started violin at four. He begged for like a year before he started playing, and then at some point I was like “Well, I guess I'll pick up piano.”  My brother is younger than me, so I ended up starting [my piano study] kind of close to the same time. I was homeschooled and always outside a lot, and then I had a good friend Isaac Denzer who started birding around eleven or so, I want to say. And then I picked it up at about age twelve.  That’s eleven years now. So it’s been a while.

NWR: Where are you studying now?

KF: I'm studying at Bowling Green State University. I'm doing my masters there; I did my undergrad at Lawrence University.

                NWR: So what's your master's degree in?

KF: It's piano performance; both my degrees are piano performance. Going very…kind of simple; it allows me to do more of what I want.

[Ed. Note Kai kept repeatedly hearing Western Kingbird, a bird I wanted for my Benton County life list; I listened for it as well. He looked around for me.]

KF: Oh, here you are. Nice. It's a good spot for them [Kingbirds]. Yeah. I think they breed out here. Why don't we walk out here just so we can get a little bit more? Get you a cool bird.

NWR: That'd be great. It’s always nice being out here, no matter what. Oh, I think I heard one now. Something out there. [Ed. Note: Break to look for birds.]

NWR: So, we were just talking about the sacrifices one makes for music, and what was that with the Great Gray Owl?

KF:  Oh, yeah. So, this was—I would have to go back and look when it was actually seen—but it was probably somewhere between seven and nine years ago. There was a Great Gray Owl in the county, not 20 minutes from my house. [Editor’s Note: Birders everywhere always go nuts for Great Grays, as we affectionately call them. They’re generally rare and hard to find and generally agreed to be one of the coolest and most majestic birds on the planet.]  But I had a rehearsal, and I think a small performance or something that day, and so I couldn't make it that day to look for the owl. I looked the next day, but I missed it. I also missed my lifer Sharp-tailed Sandpiper because I had an orchestra rehearsal. Still don't have that bird. My brother [Ed.Note: Violinist Ben Frueh] and a couple of our friends got to go see it, but I was at the rehearsal. I probably could have figured out a way to duck out early, but I just didn't. Those are probably the two biggest misses I've had because of music.

Western Kingbird. Photo by Lorin Wilkerson

NWR: Since you've been doing both birds and music since you were very young; was there some point where they always seemed to be connected somehow? Or was there a point where you started to draw that connection?

KF: I don't think they were obviously connected to me for a while. I was thinking about how birding helps, or how young birders tend to be musicians, but I didn't really connect it to my artistic practice until college. What partially got me thinking about it was during COVID, my brother and I did a series of outdoor concerts. We were playing outside at birders' places because that's who we knew. We played in Rich Hoyer’s backyard, and I remember some Lesser Goldfinches just went crazy during one of the pieces.

Then we were playing at Marilyn Miller's place in Bend, and a birder told me afterwards how helpful it was for her to focus out in nature instead of in a concert hall. In a hall, she had a hard time focusing, but out in nature, all these birds become part of the piece. That started me thinking about how I could play in a more natural soundscape. Obviously, a piano is not ideal for that, but then I went to Lawrence and heard the first pieces that were really inspired by birds: the Amy Beach Hermit Thrush pieces from 1921 [Ed Note: A video of Kai performing all compositions referenced in this interview can be accessed at the link above]. She heard them outside her window at the MacDowell Artist Residency and transcribed them. You'll get to hear those at the concert.

One of the faculty at Lawrence played those two pieces, and I knew I needed to play them. Then I met Brad Balliett, a New York-based composer and birder who is obsessed with Messiaen. We hit it off, and I premiered a piano piece Brad had written inspired by birds. That set me off. I decided I was going to do a bird concert eventually. Ideally, I would bring a piano out into nature, but the cost is unrealistic right now. For my senior experience, I thought about bringing the piano out into the bird song, but then I realized it was easier to bring the bird song to the stage using the big speakers at Lawrence. So, I continued to explore and commission bird-inspired music and work on the sound…

[E.N: As happens, we got distracted by birds]

KF: Oh, look, the Kingbird's coming in. Right there. I think a second one is coming in.

NWR: That's a great look. This is the first time I've seen them here in Benton County. We've got three Western Kingbirds now chattering and squeaking away.

KF: Maybe I'll grab my recording device. [E.N.: Here is a link to Kai's recording of one of the Western Kingbirds we heard that day.]

NWR: Sure. We'll get back to this.

[E.N., We started talking about Kai’s passion for recording birds, then remembered we needed to record that conversation.]

KF: Right, I've done a lot of that too. Let's see, where were we? Recording birds. So, I use a shotgun mic to record birds. I'm gonna hopefully invest in a parabolic at some point, but that's quite a bit of money, and I want to make sure I know what I'm getting into because they're less portable.

I use a lot of my recordings for live performances. You'll hear them in the concert on Friday. I use them in two ways. For some pieces, like the Amy Beach pieces—she didn't specify they be played with recordings, but she also didn't live at a time where that was possible. She probably would have thought it was awesome. So, I play those pieces with recordings of Hermit Thrush; I pair them that way.

I’m also doing a piece by Ravel. He doesn't specify which species, so I've taken some artistic license and paired it with some birds that I recorded in Europe last summer. Thomas Meinzen has been writing pieces for us, and he uses the recordings. I'm hoping to work on other collaborations for artistic endeavors. But I also do it partially as a "nerdy" thing; I keep a recording life list. It’s over 300 species now.

NWR: Oh, wow, that's great.

 KF: I've been keeping a photographic life list for years, and that one is well over 600. My life list is like 660 at the moment.  So, most of the birds I've seen, I've photographed. There are about 35 species I have on my life list that I haven’t managed to record.

NWR: Are all the recordings that you use in your concert recordings that you've made yourself?

KF: My goal is eventually "yes." There are a couple of recordings I've used, like the Hermit Thrush, where I didn't have my own. I’ve been trying to make some, but it's been super hard. Something about their song just doesn't pick up well on my mic. So, I've licensed some from some birders I know. And then for one of Thomas’s pieces, we're using some other recordings by some Oregon birders. But everything else is mine. My goal is to have all [of the recordings used for his performances] be mine eventually. I also make recordings for my list, and I am very interested in the quality of the recordings. I think a lot about that.

Black Phoebe. Photo by Kai Frueh 7/5/26.

NWR: So, when did you first have the idea to put together the type of program that you're performing now?  And to that point, what is the program like?

KF: While I was in college, I started thinking about creating a "bird concert." For my sophomore recital, I played two bird-themed pieces, but then I set it aside for a while to focus on other contemporary music. For my "senior experience" capstone, I finally decided to do the full bird concert.

NWR: So, this has been kind of developing in your head over the years.

KF: Yeah.  For that sophomore recital, I performed a piece Brad [Balliett] wrote for me; he's the New York composer, along with Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve and Hermit Thrush at Morn.

Then for my senior recital, I decided I was going all bird; I was going to finally do my bird concert. I opened with the first movement from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, which is about a Nightingale and Eurasian Blackbird waking up. I also premiered Headland, which Thomas Meinzen wrote for Ben and me at the Sitka Sedge artist residency at Sitka Sedge, which is north of Lincoln City if you knowwhere that is. [NOTE: per Thomas, his residency was at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, not Sitka Sedge.]

NWR: I got my lifer NorthernParula there.

KF: Oh wow. So [Thomas] wrote Headland for us. Then I premiered a new piece by Brad Balliett that he wrote for me about birding at Nickerson Beach on Long Island in 2025.

I also played a piece called Twitcher by my friend Orson Abram. That piece uses a lot of my bird recordings and a transducer on the piano soundboard so the piano acts as a speaker for the birds. It uses a bunch of extended techniques. It's actually a text score, so it's very different than a lot of the other pieces.  

The first iteration also included an improvised piece Icreated called Woodland Soundscape using my field recordings, a commissioned piece by Julia Tchira, an Argentinian composer, about Upland Sandpipers. And then I played Balakirev’s arrangement of Glinka’s The Lark, that one’s kind of fun, and I ended with Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve.

I pulled out all the stops for that concert because that year they had put surround sound into the concert hall. So, I programmed everything with surround sound; you’d be sitting in the hall and there'd be birds calling from different points for most of the recital. And I had video projection right behind me, and I had special lighting design. I wanted to go all out for my senior experience. And that was a lot of fun. That was kind of how I ended my time at Lawrence.

And then I began thinking I wanted to start bringing the program to birders, because I think birders would really enjoy it; It’s kind of like the target audience, though I think everyone can enjoy it. And so, I started reaching out to a bunch of Bird Alliances and got four concerts. I started out in Bowling Green, Ohio. Then I did the one in Portland with Bird Alliance of Oregon. I did one here in Corvallis with Mid-Willamette Bird Alliance, and then I'm going to Lincoln City, which is the one you're coming to, for Seven Capes Bird Alliance.

[Ed Note: I’ve condensed the conversation about program structure while keeping Kai’s anecdotes and analyses as follows:]

Opening: Amy Beach – Hermit Thrush at Morn (1921). I’m using the Beach pieces to bookend the recital.

Brad Balliett – Nickerson Beach which was written for me in 2025. Brad and I went out to Long Island for a music festival, and I said “"Hey, Brad, I want to go birding?” So, we met at like 5 a.m. at Jamaica Station and went out to Nickerson Beach.  Nickerson Beach is this beach where there's this giant Common Tern colony. There's lots of Black Skimmers, and I got my lifer Boat-tailed Grackle there, and they have Piping Plovers and American Oystercatchers that breed there. We had a Ruddy Turnstone, just a bunch of really fun birds like the Eastern Willet. This [performance] includes video Brad filmed through a scope on his iPhone. The birds in the video correspond to the birds Brad represents in the score. [E.N. For any of you who have ever tried to film or take photos through a scope on a smart phone and come away with abysmal results (like me, every time I’ve tried it), Kai assures me this is great footage. This gives me hope.]

Common Tern. Photo by Kai Frueh.

Thomas Meinzen – Remnants, a new piece premiered this past May.  This piece is about prairie and grassland ecosystems; something I'm really passionate about. I really like that ecosystem, and I feel like they're oftentimes overlooked from a conservation perspective. And that piece uses a system where I use Ableton [live sound processing system] to run all my sound, and I have one of the page turning pedals that controls it. And so at different points in the piece I will hit the pedal to trigger the sound.

I kind of wanted to share a little bit of the historic aspect of birds in music. And so I look at French composers because they used a lot of birds, so I'm doing [Jean-Phillippe] Rameau’s Le Rappel des Oiseaux, which um was written, uh—shoot, I don't remember the exact date. I think it's 1726. Um, so like three hundred—no, it's 1724. That's right, because it wasn't exactly three hundred years ago. [E.N. Kai’s mental process worked; he figured it out. 1724. It is most often translated as ‘The Call of the Birds,’ but alternate possible translations are ‘the conference’ or ‘the gathering’ of the birds.]

 The piece uses rocking intervals, of a fourth, and then then trills to kind of mimic birds twittering.  Composters frequently used trills, rocking intervals, repeated notes, and ornamentation to represent birds. So there's some aspects of that.  I perform that piece with recordings of Garden Warbler and Eurasian Blackcap, which are both common species throughout Europe. [E.N. Here is a link to Kai's recording of Eurasian Blackcap.] I kind of just had to take some artistic license because Rameau didn't specify which species. So I was like, okay, these are found throughout Europe, so he may have heard these. This will be fun.

Ravel – Oiseaux Tristes (1905).  It is part of his Miroirs Suite. It represents different bird species; he uses a lot of repeated notes and ornaments to represent the birds. I’ve been taking some artistic liberties and pairing it with recordings I made of Eurasian Wren, Eurasian Blackbird, and European Robin. “Oiseaux tristes” translates to "Sad Birds," and I think that those bird songs are a bit more melancholy, so it’s a good pairing.

Then, of course, I play the piece by Olivier Messiaen: The Lark, which is the sixth movement of his suite Petite Esquisse d'Oiseaux (1985). It’s short. I’m fascinated by Messiaen as a person. When I talk to musicians, they always react strongly to him. I wanted to represent that, but there is a lot of debate regarding the accuracy of his transcriptions [of bird vocalizations] and his whole process; I’ve done a lot of research into that.

He is an influential figure, but his transcriptions are complicated. Some are more accurate than others. Sometimes he tried to capture aspects of the birds other than just their songs, but he always spoke about how accurate they were, and he would then make quite inaccurate and confusing statements about birds, which is where the discourse becomes problematic. For example, in Des Canyons aux Étoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars), he has a movement about the White-browed Robin—an Australian bird—in a piece about America. He also made a comment about how the Western Tanager was only found in Bryce Canyon, I was like ‘Dude, they’re everywhere in the West.’

He was influenced by musique concrète and serialism, and he wrote all these…it’s a very different sound world. He would oftentimes expand intervals [found in birdsong] because they didn't fit the Western scale, so he would do all this interval expansion and extrapolation and he’s like ‘Oh, the proportions are the same, so therefore it’s accurate.” But he never documented how much he proportionately enlarged things. Musicologists have also noted that while rhythm was important to him, his written rhythms weren't always scientifically accurate to the birds. Still, he transcribed over, I think, 350 species of birds, which is quite an accomplishment, regardless of the accuracy.

It’s important to include him, but also to remember he wasn't the "first" bird composer. Amy Beach was transcribing live Hermit Thrushes in 1921. I even have a bird book from 1921 that uses Western musical notation for transcriptions. And Messiaen did go outside and spend a lot of time with ornithologists; he was very thoughtful in many ways, but then…yeah. It’s not a complete picture. Anyway, that’s a long sidetrack. I have a lot of opinions, a lot of thoughts about it.

NWR: [laughing] I can tell.

KF: Ok, and then going back to the program, I’m playing Upland Sandpiper--Batitú (2025), a piece by Julia Tchira, which was written for me last year. It’s about Upland Sandpipers, one of my favorite birds.  This piece imagines the migration of Upland Sandpiper from Wisconsin, where I was studying at the time, to Argentina where she’s from, and back to the U.S. and in this way it kind of connected us. The piece draws on "deep listening," a practice developed by Pauline Oliveros. It’s about being aware of every sound in the environment—this is the only piece played without recordings or multimedia; it features moments of silence to make the listener aware of the acoustic environment.

My brother Ben will join me for Thomas Meinzen’s Headland. That piece was written for us at Sitka Sedge and is on our latest EP. We’ve adjusted some of the recordings from the last time we played it; we’re using all recordings made in Oregon by Oregon birders. It celebrates the Oregon Coast and opens with Marbled Murrelet calls.

We end the program in a similar spot to where we started, with Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve (1921). It bookends the performance nicely. This is a "living concert;” the repertoire might shift next time I play it. Next time I’m going to probably commission a new piece for the program. I’m planning on doing something interactive, but…yeah. Let’s see.

So that’s the program.

Barn Swallow. Photo by Kai Frueh.

Today's Birthdays

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)
Dame Elizabeth Lutyens (1906-1983)
David Diamond (1915-2005)
David Zinman (1936)
Paul Chihara (1938)
John Mark Ainsley (1963)

and

Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)
Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961)
Oliver Sacks (1933-2015)
David Hockney (1937-2026)
Dean Koontz (1945)

Today's Birthdays

Percy Grainger (1882-1961)
George Antheil (1900-1959)
Billy Eckstine (1914-1993)
Susan Chilcott (1963-2003)
Raffi Cavoukian (1948)
Zhou Long (1953)

and

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c 1656)
Philip Johnson (1906-2005)
J. F. Powers (1917-1999)
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004)
Janet Malcolm (1934-2021)
Anna Quindlen (1953)

Today's Birthdays

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)
Cor de Groot (1914-1993)
Doc Severinsen (1927)
Joe Zawinul (1932-2007)
Ringo Starr (1940)
Michaela Petri (1958)

and

Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958)
Marc Chagall (1887-1985)
Robert Heinlein (1907-1988)
David McCullough (1933-2022)

And from The Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of Gustav Mahler (1860), born in Kalischt, Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. His father was an Austrian Jewish tavern-keeper, and Mahler experienced racial tensions from his birth: he was a minority both as a Jew and as a German-speaking Austrian among Czechs, and later, when he moved to Germany, he was a minority as a Bohemian. His father was a self-made man, very fiery, and he abused Mahler’s mother, who was rather delicate and from a higher social class. Mahler was a tense and nervous child, traits he retained into adulthood. He had heart trouble, which he had inherited from his mother, but he also had a fair measure of his father’s vitality and determination, and was active and athletic.

Mahler began his musical career at the age of four, first playing by ear the military marches and folk music he heard around his hometown, and soon composing pieces of his own on piano and accordion. He made his public piano debut at 10, and was accepted to the Vienna Conservatory at 15. When he left school, he became a conductor, and then artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera. He became famous throughout Europe as a conductor, but he was fanatical in his work habits, and expected his artists to be, as well. This didn’t win him any friends, and there were always factions calling for his dismissal. He spent his summers in the Austrian Alps, composing.

1907 was a difficult year for Mahler: he was forced to resign from the Vienna Opera; his three-year-old daughter, Maria, died; and he was diagnosed with fatal heart disease. Superstitious, he believed that he had had a premonition of these events when composing his Tragic Symphony, No. 6 (1906), which ends with three climactic hammer blows representing “the three blows of fate which fall on a hero, the last one felling him as a tree is felled.” When he composed his ninth symphony, he refused to call it “Symphony No. 9” because he believed that, like Beethoven and Bruckner before him, his ninth symphony would be his last. He called it A Symphony for Tenor, Baritone, and Orchestra instead, and he appeared to have fooled fate, because he went on to compose another symphony. This one he called Symphony No. 9 (1910); he joked that he was safe, since it was really his 10th symphony, but No. 9 proved to be his last symphony after all, and he died in 1911. Most of his work was misunderstood during his lifetime, and his music was largely ignored — and sometimes banned — for more than 30 years after his death. A new generation of listeners discovered him after World War II, and today he is one of the most recorded and performed composers in classical music.

Today's Birthdays

Alberto Nepomuceno (1864-1920)
Hans Eisler (1898-1962)
Dame Elizabeth Lutyens (1906-1983)
Dorothy Kirsten (1910-1992)
Ernst Haefliger (1919-2007)
Bill Haley (1925-1981)
Maurice Hasson (1934)
Vladimir Ashkenazy (1937)
Stephen Hartke (1952)

and

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)
Eleanor Clark (1913-1996)
Hilary Mantel (1952)

Today's Birthdays

Josef Holbrooke (1878-1958)
Wanda Landowska (1879-1958)
Jan Kubelík (1880-1940)
Gordon Jacob (1895-1984)
Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984)
George Rochberg (1918-2005)
János Starker (1924-2013)
Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993)
Matthias Bamert (1942)
Alexander Lazarev (1945)
Paul Daniel (1958)
Isabelle Poulenard (1961)

and

A. E. Douglass (1867-1962)
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
Barbara Frischmuth (1941)
Craig Nova (1945)

Today's Birthdays

Louis-Claude Daquin (1694-1772)
Stephen Foster (1826-1864)
Roy Henderson (1899-2000)
Flor Peeters (1903-1986)
Mitch Miller (1911-2010)
Tibor Varga (1921-2003)
Cathy Berberian (1925-1983)

and

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Lionel Trilling (1905-1975)
Neil Simon (1927-2018)
Tracy Letts (1965)

Today's Birthdays

Theodore Presser (1848-1925)
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
George M. Cohan (1878-1942)
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)
Meyer Kupferman (1926-2003)
Carlos Kleiber (1930-2004)
Brigitte Fassbaender (1939)

and

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992)
Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
Dave Berry (1947)

Today's Birthdays

Henri Weiniawski (1835-1880)
Carl Orff (1895-1982)
Ljuba Welitsch (1913-1996)
Ian Wallace (1919-2009)
Josephine Veasey (1930-2022)
Jerry Herman (1931-2019)
Arlo Guthrie (1947)
Graham Johnson (1950)
Béla Fleck (1958)

and

John Calvin (1509-1564)
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)
Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
Saul Bellow (1915-2005)
Alice Munro (1931-2024)

Today's Birthdays

Theodore Presser (1848-1925)
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
George M. Cohan (1878-1942)
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)
Meyer Kupferman (1926-2003)
Carlos Kleiber (1930-2004)
Brigitte Fassbaender (1939)

and

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992)
Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
Dave Berry (1947)

Review of New Wave Opera's Deep Water up at Oregon ArtsWatch

 My review of the world premiere of Portland composer and librettist Caroline Louise Miller's first full-length opera, Deep Water, is up at Oregon ArtsWatch.  A meditation on climate grief and queer love at the end of the world, this thought-provoking and beautiful piece is exactly the kind of cutting-edge stuff I've come to expect from New Wave Opera.  And there's a Goblin Shark.

Today's Birthdays

Thomas Andrew Dorsey (1899-1993)
Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012)
Andrae Crouch (1942-2015)
Philip Brunelle (1943)
Mario Venzago (1948)
Sioned Williams (1953)
Nikolai Demidenko (1955)

and

George Sand (1804-1876)
Jean Stafford (1915-1979)
William Strunk Jr. (1969-1946)
Twyla Tharp (1941)

Today's Birthdays

Georg Anton Benda (1722-1795)
Laszlo Lajtha (1892-1963)
John Duke (1899-1984)
Lena Horne (1917-2010)
James Loughran (1931-2024)
Giles Swayne (1946)
Stephen Barlow (1954)
Esa-Pekka Salonen (1958)

and

John Gay (1685-1732)
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

Today's Birthdays

Aarre Merikanto (1893-1958)
Nelson Eddy (1901-1967)
Leroy Anderson (1908-1975)
Frank Loesser (1910-1969)
Bernard Hermann (1911-1975)
Rafael Kubelik (1914-1996)
Sylvia Olden Lee (1917-2004)
Ezra Laderman (1924-2015)
Joelle Wallach (1946)
"Little Eva" Boyd 1945-2003)
Anne-Sophie Mutter (1963)

and

Antoine de Saint Exupéry (1900-1944)
James K. Baxter (1926-1972)
Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006)

Today's Birthdays

Napoléon Coste (1805-1883)
Joseph Joachim (1831-1907)
Richard Rodgers (1902-1979)
Arnold Shaw (1909-1989)
Sergiu Celibidache (1912-1996)
George Lloyd (1913-1998)
Giselher Klebe (1925-2009)
Robert Xavier Rodriguez (1946)
Philip Fowke (1950)
Thomas Hampson (1955)

and

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936)
Eric Ambler (1909-1989)
Mark Helprin (1947)

Today's Birthdays

Friedrich Silcher (1789-1860)
Toti Dal Monte (1893-1975)
Karel Reiner (1910-1979)
George Walker (1922-2018)
Ruth Schönthal (1924-2006)
Anno Moffo (1932-2006)
Hugh Wood (1932-2021)
Daniel Asia (1953)
Nancy Gustafson (1956)
Magnus Lindberg (1958)
Robert King (1960)

and

James Smithson (1765-1829)
Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906)
Helen Keller (1880-1968)
Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)
Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)
Alice McDermott (1953)

Today's Birthday

Big Bill Broonzy (1893-1958)
Hugues Cuénod (1902-2010)
Wolfgang Windgassen (1914-1974)
Giuseppe Taddei (1916-2010)
Syd Lawrence (1923-1998)
Jacob Druckman (1928-1996)
Claudio Abbado (1933-2014)

and

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)
Walter Farley (1916-1989)
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P.S.
Today - 6/26/26 - Susie Svendsen and James Bash (music critic and founder of this blog) are getting married at First Immanuel Lutheran Church in Portland, Oregon.

Today's Birthdays

Gustave Charpentier (1860-1956)
Arthur Tracy (1899-1997)
Bill Russo (1928-2003)
Kurt Schwertsik (1935)
Carly Simon (1945)

and

Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926)
George Abbott (1887-1995)
George Orwell (1903-1950)
Sonia Sotomayor (1954)

Today's Birthdays

Harry Partch (1901-1974)
Pierre Fournier (1906-1986)
Milton Katims (1909-2006)
Denis Dowling (1910-1984)
Terry Riley (1935)

and

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
John Ciardi (1916-1986)
Anita Desai (1937)
Stephen Dunn (1939-2021)

Today's Birthdays

Carl Reinecke (1824-1910)
Mieczyslaw Horszowski (1892-1993)
George Russell (1923-2009)
Adam Faith (1940-2003)
James Levine (1943-2021)
Nigel Osborne (1948)
Nicholas Cleobury (1950)
Sylvia McNair (1956)

and

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
Michael Shaara (1928-1988)
David Leavitt (1961)

Today's Birthdays

Francesco Manfredini (1684-1762)
Étienne Nicolas Méhul (1763-1817)
Frank Heino Damrosch (1859-1937)
Jennie Tourel (1900-1973)
Walter Leigh (1905-1942)
Sir Peter Pears (1910-1986)
Hans-Hubert Schönzeler (1925-1997)
Pierre Thibaud (1929-2004)
Libor Pešek (1933-2022)
Pierre Amoyal (1949)
Christopher Norton (1953)

and

Harriett Mulford Stone Lothrop (1844-1924)
Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970)
Billy Wilder (1906-2002)
Joseph Papp (1921-1991)
Meryl Streep (1949)
Elizabeth Warren (1949)

Review of Metropolitan Youth Symphony season finale in Oregon Arts Watch

My review of the final concert of the season for the Metropolitan Youth Symphony has been published in Oregon Arts Watch here. I hope that you enjoy reading it.

Today's Birthdays

Henry Holden Huss (1862-1953)
Hilding Rosenberg (1892-1985)
Harry Newstone (1921-2006)
Lou Ottens (1926-2025)
Lalo Schifrin (1932)
Diego Masson (1935)
Philippe Hersant (1948)
Judith Bingham (1952)
Jennifer Larmore (1958)

and

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1972)
Donald Peattie (1898-1964)
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Mary McCarthy (1912-1989)
Ian McEwan (1948)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1890. Richard Strauss's tone-poem "Death and Transfiguration" and "Burleske" for Piano and Orchestra were given their premieres in Eisenach, at a convention of the General German Music Association, with the composer conducting and Eugen d'Albert as the piano soloist in the "Burleske".

Today's Birthdays

Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-1792)
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
Wilfred Pelletier (1896-1982)
Chet Atkins (1924-2001)
Eric Dolphy (1928-1964)
Ingrid Haebler (1929-2023)
Arne Nordheim (1931-2010)
Mickie Most (1938-2003)
Brian Wilson (1942)
Anne Murray (1945)
André Watts (1946)
Lionel Richie (1949)

and

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)
Lillian Hellman (1905-1984)
Josephine Winslow Johnson (1910-1990)
Vikram Seth (1952)

Today's Birthdays

Johann Wenzel Stamitz (1717-1757)
Carl Zeller (1842-1898)
Alfredo Catalani (1854-1893)
Sergei Taneyev (1856-1915)
Guy Lombardo (1902-1977)
Edwin Gerschefski (1909-1988)
Anneliese Rothenberger (1926-2010)
Elmar Oliveira (1950)
Philippe Manoury 1952)

and

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Pauline Kael (1919-2001)
Tobias Wolff (1945)
Salman Rushdie (1947)

Today's Birthdays

Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831)
David Popper (1843-1913)
Sir George Thalben-Ball (1896-1987)
Edward Steuermann (1892-1964)
Manuel Rosenthal (1904-2003)
Eduard Tubin (1905-1982)
Robert Commanday (1922-2015) Paul McCartney (1942)
Hans Vonk (1942-2004)
Anthony Halstead (1945)
Diana Ambache (1948)
Eva Marton (1948)
Peter Donohoe (1953)

and

Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016)
Gail Godwin (1937)
Jean McGarry (1948)
Chris Van Allsburg (1949)
Amy Bloom (1953)
Richard Powers (1957)

Today's Birthdays

John Wesley (1703-1791)
Charles Gounod (1818-1893)
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Hermann Reutter (1900-1985)
Einar Englund (1916-1999)
Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006)
Sir Edward Downes (1924-2009)
Christian Ferras (1933-1982)
Gérard Grisey (1946-1998)
Derek Lee Ragin (1958)

and

M. C. Escher (1898-1972)
John Hersey (1914-1993)
Ron Padgett (1942)

Today's Birthdays

Niccolò Vito Piccinni (1728-1800)
Helen Traubel (1899-1972)
Willi Boskovsky (1909-1990)
Sergiu Comissiona (1928-2005)
Lucia Dlugoszewski (1931-2000)
Jerry Hadley (1952-2007)
David Owen Norris (1953)

and

Geronimo (1829-1909)
Joyce Carol Oates (1938)

Today's Birthdays

Franz Danzi (1763-1826)
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
Ernestine Schumann‑Heink (1861-1936)
Guy Ropartz (1864-1955)
Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981)
Sir Thomas Armstrong (1898-1994)
Otto Luening (1900-1996)
Geoffrey Parsons (1929-1995)
Waylon Jennings (1937-2002)
Harry Nilsson (1941-1994)
Paul Patterson (1947)
Rafael Wallfisch (1953)
Robert Cohen (1959)

and

Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827)
Saul Steinberg (1914-1999)
Dava Sobel (1947)

Today's Birthdays

Antonio Sacchini (1730-1786)
Simon Mayr (1763-1845)
Nicolai Rubinstein (1835-1881)
John McCormack (1884-1945)
Heddle Nash (1894-1961)
Rudolf Kempe (1910-1976)
Stanley Black (1913-2002)
Theodore Bloomfield (1923-1998)
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004)
Natalia Gutman (1942)
Lang Lang (1982)

and

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Ralph Barnes (1899-1940)
John Bartlett (1820-1905)
Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971)
Ernesto (Che) Guevara de la Serna (1928-1967)
Jonathan Raban (1942)
Mona Simpson (1971)

Review: Oregon Symphony's concert, featuring works by Tchaikovsky, Akiho, and Green

Andy Akiho takes a bow - photo by Jason Quigley

Guest review by Joshua Lickteig

— The month of May’s final concert for the Oregon Symphony was one of full volume and conveyed discernment through kinetic assortment and distinct traditions. The motion in the building at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall the evening of Saturday the 30th was in fervid flow. The evening’s program, “Percussion & Rhythm”, spanned works separated by nearly 150 years.

The latter half brought a luminous rendering of Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1878) by Tchaikovsky, a work not indirect in foretelling future music. The orchestra here illuminates an early modernist seer following their daring and considered voyage with Andy Akiho’s "Percussion Concerto" (2019) and Brittany J. Green’s "Testify!" (2024).

The sectional shifts of Symphony No. 4 highlighted varieties of responsibility across instruments, recurring through fanfare to vanity to ache to acceptance, and shared anchorage of brass and woodwind and strings. The most notable of Music Director and Conductor David Danzmayr’s enthralling guidance showed in the timing of the piccolo passage in movement III. (Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato), the counterposing of the finale’s use of Russian folk with the rhetorical Russian imperial style of movement I. (Andante Sostenuto), and the finale’s swift call and response between orchestra and horns. The melody of exposed bassoon was both joyous and inquisitive.

"Testify!" arrived as its own whirlwind, preceding the Tchaikovsky in OSO's first performance of the work. In just five minutes, building from a church tambourine pattern — maternal influence made orchestral by Green (b. 1991) — and bodily jubilation scored as cheerful exclamations of joy, the piece bloomed into something the musicians would collectively discover rather than perform. Green’s invention runs through Julius Eastman’s organic minimalism — rhythm as living, breathing testimony rather than process — and from the stage emanated a sonic prism.

Across three movements and an interlude, the "Percussion Concerto" opened the evening with a cosmic assortment of instrumentation: ceramic bowls, marimba, toy piano, brake drum, vibraphone, other found objects — each not merely played but awakened. OSO inhabited an urgency evocative of performing "Rite of Spring," but less insistent and more transparent, sometimes giving way to impulse, but mostly to discipline. Destabilizing metric jolts in the progression of the first movement (Ceramic) transposed forces active in the timeless earth and heavens, dissolving the questioning of categories of music in the way of yielding to vital force. In places, staccato phrasings would later find their mirror in Symphony No. 4, as would thunderous and glistening celebrations of triangle, timpani, and bass drum. Some sounds achieved were abstruse; bow on vibraphone, for instance, like a ghostly synthesizer. Akiho (b. 1979) was seated for the concerto in the west dress circle, then appeared on stage with the orchestra alongside Danzmayr, the percussionists Michael Roberts, Stephen Kehner, Jon Greeney, and Sergio Carreno, receiving ovation after ovation. An encore performance included Akiho with steel pan in a special arrangement of his composition "Daidai Iro | Orange" for percussion quintet. The concert was recorded for commercial release.

Also note that on June 5, Reference Recordings released “Beneath Lighted Coffers: Concerto for Steel Pans & Orchestra” the Oregon Symphony's first album under David Danzmayr, featuring the same four percussionists who premiered the Percussion Concerto six years ago with Colin Currie.

The night’s program, nearing the close of OSO’s 129th season, was concentric in lucid sonority, each work drawn toward the others in a way neither announced nor explained, yet each questioning its own purpose and happiness in profoundly different ways. Rhythm was not ornamental but architectural. And melodic configurations expressed how the ordinary is transformed through observation.

Today's Birthdays

Anton (Antonín) Wranitzky (1761-1820)
Anton Eberl (1766-1807)
Elisabeth Schumann (1888-1952)
Carlos Chavez (1899-1978)
Alan Civil (1929-1989)
Gwynne Howell (1938)
Sarah Connolly (1963)
Alain Trudel (1966)

and

Frances Burney (1752-1840)
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Mary Antin (1881-1949)
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)
Artem Chekh (1985)

Today's Birthdays

Vanni Marcoux (1877-1962)
Werner Josten (1895-1963)
Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986)
Leon Goossens (1897-1988)
Maurice Ohana (1913-1992)
Uta Hagen (1919-2004)
Ian Partridge (1938)
Chick Corea (1941)
Oliver Knussen (1952)

and

Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)
Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)
Egon Schiele (1890-1918)
Djuna Barnes (1892-1982)
Anne Frank (1929-1945)

Today's Birthdays

Francesco Antonio Bonporti (1672-1749)
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
George Frederick McKay (1899-1970)
Hazel Scott (1920-1981)
Shelly Manne (1920-1984)
Carlisle Floyd (1926-2021)
Antony Rooley (1944)
Douglas Bostock (1955)
Conrad Tao (1994)

and

Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
William Styron (1925-2006)
Athol Fugard (1932-2025)

Pianist and Birder Kai Frueh to Present a Unique Concert in West Linn June 20

Kai Frueh, a Corvallis native now based in Bowling Green, OH, is a pianist and birder who will bring a very unique concert to The Meteor Lounge in West Linn at 7pm on June 20. Describing himself as a "collaborative musician and interdisciplinary artist who blends new music, environmental themes and birdsong into chamber, ensemble, and immersive solo performances," Kai forms one half of the Frueh Brothers duo (along with his brother, violinist Ben Frueh).

In addition to being obsessed with music, he is obsessed with birds, and the West Linn concert is just the first in an ambitious summer program in NW Oregon this year. Not only is there the opportunity to hear Kai's music, in West Linn on June 21, as well as in Corvallis June 27 and in Lincoln City July 10, but he will also put his expert-level birding abilities to use and guide a birdsong walk at the incredibly birdy Powell Butte Nature Park in east Portland. Complete details are:

1. Summer Solstice Bird Concert with Kai Frueh

Meteor Lounge 

2015 8th Avenue West Linn, OR 97068

Saturday, June 20, 2026

Doors open: 6:45 p.m.
Concert begins: 7:15 p.m.

Sponsored by Bird Alliance of Oregon as part of their Bird Days of Summer.

Tickets required. All seating is General Admission.
Fee: $25 members / $35 non-members
Student/youth fee: $15

Proceeds will go to supporting Bird Alliance of Oregon’s programs.

2. The Bird Days of Summer: Intersection of Birdsong and Music — Birding at Powell Butte

Powell Butte Nature Park

16160 SE Powell Blvd, Portland, OR

Sunday, June 21, 2026

8am – ~ 10:30am

Sponsored by Bird Alliance of Oregon as part of their Bird Day’s of Summer.

Join musician and birder Kai Frueh for an exploration of the birds of Powell Butte Nature Park. This walk will focus on the songs of our feathered friends which Kai uses in his musical performances.

We will move at a relaxed pace with frequent stops to enjoy the musicality of birdsong and discuss intersections of birdsong and music. With a mixture of habitats including grassland and forest, we will get to experience a lot of birdsong and enjoy birding by ear. Participants of all experience levels are welcome!

Registration required

3. Kai’s Bird Concert sponsored by Mid Willamette Bird Alliance

Good Samaritan Episcopal Church

333 NW 35th St, Corvallis, OR 97330

Sunday, June 27, 2026, 7pm PDT

This will be a one-hour immersive bird-themed concert combining Kai’s two biggest passions: music and birds. In this concert Kai explores many different ways composers have drawn inspiration from birds in their piano works spanning from the early 1700s all the way through today. The concert will include works by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Amy Beach, and Olivier Messiaen, as well as pieces written specifically for this program by Brad Balliett, Julia Tchira, and Thomas Meinzen. The musical experience is enhanced with many of Kai’s field recordings, compiled to recreate a natural soundscape in the concert hall. This concert promises to be an unforgettable experience, delighting bird fanatics and music lovers alike.

Free Admission – donations appreciated

4. Kai’s Bird Concert as part of Seven Cape Bird Alliance Osprey Days

Lincoln City Cultural Center, Lincoln City, OR

540 NE Hwy 101, Lincoln City, OR

Friday, July 10, 2026 7pm PDT

Same program as #3

Concert tickets and registration for the bird outing are available at his website, linked to aboved. Watch NW Reverb in the weeks to come for an interview with Kai, which will be conducted as we bird some of his favorite spots in his hometown of Corvallis, as well as a review of the Lincoln City Concert.

Today's Birthdays

Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843-1900)
Hariclea Darclée (1860-1939)
Frederick Loewe (1904-1988)
Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911-1984)
Tikhon Khrennikov (1913-2007)
Bruno Bartoletti (1925-2013)
Mark-Anthony Turnage (1960)

and

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)
Terence Rattigan (1911-1977)
James Salter (1925-2015)
Maurice Sendak (1928-2012)

Review of Colin Currie and the Oregon Symphony playing Danny Elfman's 'Percussion Concerto' up at Classical Voice North America

 

In my first assignment for CVNA, I reviewed the June 4th concert at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. You can read the article here.

Today's Birthdays

Anton Weidinger (1766-1852)
Otto Nicolai (1810-1849)
Alberic Magnard (1865-1914)
Carl Nielsen (1865-1931)
Cole Porter (1891-1964)
Dame Gracie Fields (1898-1979)
Ingolf Dahl (1912-1970)
Les Paul (1915-2009)
Franco Donatoni (1927-2000)
Charles Wuorinen (1938-2020)
Ileana Cotrubas (1939)

and

Baroness Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914)
George Axelrod (1922-2003)
Patricia Cornwell (1956)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1840, Franz Liszt gives a solo performance at the Hanover Square Rooms in London billed as "Recitals." This was the first time the term "recital" was used to describe a public musical performance, and it caused much discussion and debate at the time. Liszt is credited with both inventing and naming the now-common solo piano "recital."

Today's Birthdays

Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1750)
Nicolas Dalayrac (1753-1809)
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942)
Reginald Kell (1906-1981)
Emanuel Ax (1949)
Harold Meltzer (1966-2024)

and

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
John W Campbell (1910-1970)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1912, Ravel's ballet, "Daphnis et Chloé" was premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, by Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe, Pierre Monteux conducting.

Today's Birthdays

Leopold Auer (1845-1930)
George Szell (1897-1970)
Ilse Wolf (1921-1999)
Philippe Entremont (1934)
Neeme Järvi (1937)
Sir Tom Jones (1940)
Jaime Laredo (1941)
Prince (Prince Rogers Nelson) (1958-2015)
Roberto Alagna (1963)
Olli Mustonen (1967)

and

Paul Gaugin (1848-1903)
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024)
Orham Pamuk (1952)
Louise Erdrich (1954)

Today's Birthdays

Sir John Stainer (1840-1901)
Siegfried Wagner (1869-1930)
Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978)
Vincent Persichetti (1915-1987)
Iain Hamilton (1922-2000)
Serge Nigg (1924-2008)
Klaus Tennstedt (1926-1998)
Louis Andriessen (1939-2021)
Paul Esswood (1942)

and

Pierre Corneille (1606-1684)
Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837)
Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
Maxine Kumin (1925-2014)
Julian Mayfield (1928-1984)
Robert Pirsig (1928-2017)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1931, Henry Cowell's "Synchrony" received its premiere in Paris, at the first of two concerts of modern American music with the Orchestre Straram conducted by Nicholas Slonimsky and funded anonymously by Charles Ives. On the same program, Slonimsky also conducted the Orchestre Straram in the European premieres of works by Adolph Weiss ("American Life"), Ives ("Three Places in England"), Carl Ruggles ("Men and Mountains"), and the Cuban composer Amadeo Roldan ("La Rehambatamba").

Today's Birthdays

Arthur Somervell (1863-1937)
Robert Mayer (1879-1985)
Eduard Tubin (1905-1982)
Daniel Pinkham (1923-2006)
Peter Schat (1935-2003)
James Dick (1940)
Martha Argerich (1941)
Bill Hopkins (1943-1981)

and

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)
Alfred Kazin (1915-1998)
David Wagoner (1926-2021)
Margaret Drabble (1939)
David Hare (1947)

Review: Vancouver Symphony delivers spirited Prokofiev, Adams, and Dvořák

Inés Issel Burzyrńska

A very full house lit up the Skyview Concert Hall on May 31 for the Vancouver Symphony’s season finale. Laughter added to the vibe during the introductory welcome when VSO Board Chair Carol Van Natta jokingly noted that she wakes up to All Classical’s Warren Black, who was emceeing the concert. Then an audience member shouted “You’re not the only one!”

Laughter from all corners of the hall erupted, and after things calmed down, Hal Abrams, the orchestra’s Director of Development, pitched the Vancouver Art and Music Festival (August 7 through 9), which will be adding quartet music at the waterfront to its schedule. With the addition of a sold-out concert on Sunday afternoon, things continue to look promising for the Vancouver Symphony.

Guest artist Inés Issel Burzyrńska highlighted the evening with an exceptional performance of Prokofiev’s “Concerto No. 2 in G minor for Violin and Orchestra. The 24-year-old Spanish violinist, who is pursuing studies at the New England Conservatory, coaxed a lovely singing tone from instrument. She executed numerous filigree passages with elan, and her final, high note at the end of the second movement shimmered enticingly. For the third movement, she dug in and exchanged dance-like passages with the orchestra, bringing the concerto to a fast, exciting finish.

The audience erupted into a standing ovation, and Burzyrńska responded with a wistful encore, “The Song of the Birds” by the great cellist and composer Pablo Casals.

Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, (From the New World) occupied the second half of the program, and it was conducted impressively from memory by Brotons. The first movement got off to a smashing start with crisp sforzandos and sharp attacks from the orchestra, although the trumpets entered too loudly. The lovely, melancholy melody in the second movement, enhanced through the English horn of Karen Strand, infused the hall with calmness and comfort. The horns struggled a bit in the third movement and that reduced the stirring quality of the music. The orchestra romped through the fourth with gusto, but again some intonation issues marred the impact of the finale. Overall, the spirit of the performance won out and the audience rewarded it with enthusiastic applause.

Brotons clearly loves the piece, conducting with great animation. But most of the dynamics were in the medium forte to double forte range. True pianissimos were few and far between. More dynamic contrast would have helped greatly.

John Adams “The Chairman Dances” (Foxtrot for Orchestra) opened the concert. It is an orchestral segment excerpted from Adams’ opera “Nixon in China” in which Richard and Pat Nixon reminisce with Mao and Madame Mao over earlier times. The minimalist style of the piece used a lot of repetition interrupted by shifting keys. The piece started fine with the strings fashioning a silky sound, but about halfway through it began to plod along rather than dance

When Brotons returned to the stage in the second half of the concert, he mentioned that he could have easily gotten lost in the score because of the repetitive style of the music; so that if he turned back two pages instead of one page on the repeat, he could have gotten easily get lost. The Vancouver Symphony is fortunate to have a top-notch conductor – who also composes fantastic music – who knows how to avoid such pitfalls.

Today's Birthdays

James Hewitt (1770-1827)
Evgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988)
Alan Shulman (1915-2002)
Robert Merrill (1917-2004)
Irwin Bazelon (1922-1995)
Oliver Nelson (1932-1975)
Anthony Braxton (1945)
Cecilia Bartoli (1966)

and

Josef Sittard (1846-1903)
Karl Valentin (1882-1948)
Robert Anderson (1917-2009)

Today's Birthdays

František Jan Škroup (1801-1862)
Charles Lecocq (1832-1918)
Jan Peerce (1904-1984)
Valerie Masterson (1937)
Curtis Mayfield (1942-1999)
Greg Sandow (1943)
Lynne Dawson (1956)

and

Josephine Baker (1906-1975)
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Larry Jeff McMurtry (1936-2021)

Today's Birthdays

James Cutler Dunn Parker (1828-1916)
Felix Weingartner (1863-1942)
Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
Jozef Cleber (1916-1999)
Samuel Jones (1935)
Marvin Hamlisch (1944-2012)
Mark Elder (1947)
Neil Shicoff (1949)
Michel Dalberto (1955)

and

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

and from The New Music Box:

On June 2, 1938, Amy Beach began work on her Piano Trio while in residence at the MacDowell Colony. She finished the composition fifteen days later (June 18th) and published it as her Op. 150. It was to be her last major work.

Today's Birthdays

Georg Muffat (1653-1704)
Ferdinando Paër (1771-1839)
Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857)
Werner Janssen (1899-1990)
Percy Whitlock (1903-1946)
Nelson Riddle (1921-1985)
Yehudi Wyner (1929)
Edo de Waart (1941)
Richard Goode (1943)
Frederica von Stade (1945)
Arlene Sierra (1970)

and

John Masefield (1878-1967)
Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957)
Albert Starr (1926-2024)
Naguib Surur (1932-1978)
Colleen McCullough (1937-2015)
Sheri Holman (1966)
Amy Schumer (1981)

Today's Birthdays

Georg Muffat (1653-1704)
Ferdinando Paër (1771-1839)
Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857)
Werner Janssen (1899-1990)
Percy Whitlock (1903-1946)
Nelson Riddle (1921-1985)
Yehudi Wyner (1929)
Edo de Waart (1941)
Richard Goode (1943)
Frederica von Stade (1945)
Arlene Sierra (1970)

and

John Masefield (1878-1967)
Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957)
Albert Starr (1926-2024)
Naguib Surur (1932-1978)
Colleen McCullough (1937-2015)
Sheri Holman (1966)
Amy Schumer (1981)

Today's Birthdays

Marin Marais (1656-1728)
Louise Farrenc (1804-1875)
Billy Mayerl (1902-1959)
Alfred Deller (1912-1979)
Akira Ifukube (1914-2006)
Shirley Verrett (1931-2010)
Peter Yarrow (1938-2025)
Bruce Adolphe (1955)
Marty Ehrlich (1955)

and

Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853)
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Clint Eastwood (1930)

Today's Birthdays

Riccardo Zandonai (1883-1944)
Jelly Aranyi de Hunyadvár (1893-1966)
Benny Goodman (1909-1986)
George London (1920-1985)
Gustav Leonhardt (1928-2012)
Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016)
Zoltán Kocsis (1952)
Anne LeBaron (1953)

and

Howard Hawks (1896-1977)
Colm Toibin (1955)

and from the New Music Box:

On May 30, 1923, 26-year-old composer and conductor Howard Hanson, who would later be one of the founders of the American Music Center, led the world premiere performance of his Nordic Symphony, the first of his seven symphonies and still one of his best-known works, in Rome during his residence as first holder of the American Rome Prize.

Review of Portland Opera production of Verdi's Requiem in Oregon Arts Watch

My review of Verdi's Requiem as presented by Portland Opera has been published in Oregon Arts Watch here.

Today's Birthdays

Francesco Fanciulli (1853-1915)
Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909)
Rudolf Tobias (1873-1918)
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957)
Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)
Helmuth Rilling (1933-2026)
Michael Berkley (1948)
Linda Esther Gray (1948)
Melissa Etheridge (1961)

and

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
Steven Levitt (1967)

and

from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1913, Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du printemps" (The Rite of Spring) received its premiere performance in Paris, by Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, Pierre Monteux conducting.

Today's Birthdays

Thomas Arne (1710-1788)
Josiah Flagg (1737-1795)
Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
Giovanni Sgambati (1841-1914)
Sir George Dyson(1883-1964)
T-Bone Walker (1910-1975)
Nicola Rescigno (1916-2008)
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
John Culshaw (1924-1980)
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2012)
Richard Van Allan (1935-2008
Maki Ishii (1936-2003)
Elena Souliotis (1943-2004)
Levon Chilingirian (1948)

and

Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)
Ian Flemming (1908-1964)
May Swenson (1913-1989)
Walker Percy (1916-1990)

Today's Birthdays

Jacques Halévy (1799-1862)
Joseph Joachim Raff (1822-1882)
Louis Durey (1888-1979)
Claude Champagne (1891-1965)
Ernst Wallfisch (1920-1979)
Margaret Buechner (1922-1998)
Thea Musgrave (1928)
Donald Keats (1929-2018)
Elizabeth Harwood (1938-1990)
James Wood (1953)

and

Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910)
Wild Bill Hickok (1837-1876)
Isadora Duncan (1877-1927)
Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961)
Rachel Carson (1907-1964)
John Cheever (1912-1982)
John Barth (1930-2024)
Linda Pastan (1932-2023)

Today's Birthdays

Al Jolson (1886-1950)
Eugene Goossens (1893-1962)
Ernst Bacon (1898-1990)
Vlado Perlemuter (1904-2002)
Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin) (1916-1999)
François‑Louis Deschamps (1919-2004)
Peggy Lee (1920-2002)
Joseph Horovitz (1926-2022)
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
Teresa Stratas (1938)
William Bolcom (1938)
Howard Goodall (1958)
Armando Bayolo (1973)

and

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837)
Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)
Frankie Manning (1914-2009)
Alan Hollinghurst (1954)

and from the New Music Box:

On May 26, 1953, Aaron Copland appeared before the Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Today's Birthdays

Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins (1849-1908)
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
Beverly Sills (1929-2007)
Franco Bonisolli (1937-2003)

and

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
Raymond Carver (1938-1988)
Jamaica Kincaid (1949)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1944, Arturo Toscanini conducts the combined NBC Symphony and New York Philharmonic in a benefit concert of music by Wagner, Verdi, and Sousa at the old Madison Square Garden. The concert raised $100,000 for the Red Cross. During an intermission auction, New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia auctioned off Toscanini's baton for $10,000.
I wonder where that baton is today...

Todays Birthdays

Paul Paray (1886-1979)
Joan Hammond (1912-1986)
Hans‑Martin Linde (1930)
Maurice André (1933-2012)
Harold Budd (1936-2020)
Bob Dylan (1941)
Konrad Boehmer (1941-2014)
Fiona Kimm (1952)
Paul McCreesh (1960)

and

William Trevor (1928-2016)
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)
Declan Kiberd (1951)
Michael Chabon (1963)

Today's Birthdays

Andrea Luchesi (1741-1801)
Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870)
Louis Glass (1864-1936)
Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986)
Artie Shaw (1910-2004)
Jean Françaix (1912-1997)
Alicia de Larrocha (1923-2009)
Robert Moog (1934-2005)
Joel Feigin (1951)

and

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952)
Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)

Today's Birthdays

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
Johann Schrammel (1850-1893)
Minna Keal (1909-1999)
Sun Ra (1914-1993)
George Tintner (1917-1999
Humphrey Lyttelton (1921-2008)
Claude Ballif (1924-2004)
John Browning (1933-2003)
Peter Nero (1934-2023)

and

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
Laurence Olivier (1907-1989)
Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014)

and from the New Music Box:

On May 21, 1893, in an lengthy article published in the New York Herald titled "Real Value of Negro Melodies," Bohemian composer Antonin Dvorak, during his three-year sojourn in the United States, prognosticated that the future of American music should be based on "negro melodies" and announced that the National Conservatory of Music, where he was serving as Director at the time, would be "thrown open free of charge to the negro race." It was to be the first of a total of seven articles in the Herald in which Dvorak expounded these ideas which provoked comments ranging from incredulity to denunciation by composers and performers around the world, including Anton Bruckner, Anton Rubinstein and John Knowles.

Review of Oregon Symphony concert with Pintscher and Bax in CVNA

My review of last weekend's Oregon Symphony concert with guest conductor Matthais Pintscher and pianist Alessio Bax has been published in Classical Voice North America here.

Today's Birthdays

Joseph Parry (1841-1903)
Thomas "Fats" Waller (1904-1943)
Gina Bachauer (1913-1976)
Maurice André (1933-2012)
Heinz Holliger (1939)
Rosalind Plowright (1949)
Linda Bouchard (1957)

and

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Henri Rousseau (1844-1910)
Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989)
Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Article about the Dane Lam and Hawai'i Symphony and Asian instruments in concertos

A few weeks ago, I was in Hawaii to review a Hawai'i Symphony concert. I had time to interview Dane Lam about concertos that featured Asian instruments. My conversation with Lam is now in The Strad online here.

Today's Birthdays

Hephzibah Menuhin (1920-1981)
George Hurst (1926-2012)
Karl Anton Rikenbacher (1940-2014)
Tison Street (1943)
Joe Cocker (1944-2014)
Cher - Cherilyn Sarkisian (1946)
Sue Knussen (1949-2003)
Jane Parker-Smith (1950-2020)
Emma Johnson (1966)

and

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

Today's Birthdays

Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667)
Nellie Melba (1859-1931)
Kerstin Thorborg (1896-1970)
Sandy Wilson (1924-2014)
Pete Townshend (1945)
Stephen Varcoe (1949)

and

Malcom X (1925-1965)
Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)
Nora Ephron (1941-2012)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1886, the American premiere of J.S. Bach's Mass in B minor (11 selections) was given during the May Festival in Cincinnati, conducted by Theodore Thomas. The next documented performance (12 sections) was given in Boston on February 27, 1887, by the Handel and Haydn Society, with Carl Zerrahn conducting a chorus of 432 and an orchestra of 50. In both the 1886 Cincinnati and 1887 Boston performances, the famous 19-century German soprano Lilli Lehmann appeared as one of the soprano soloists. The first complete performance of the work was apparently given either at the Moravian Church in Bethlehem on Mar 17, 1900, by the Bach Choir under J. Fred Wolf, or at Carnegie Hall in new York on April 5, 1900, by the Oratorio Society, Frank Damrosch conducting.

Today's Birthdays

Johann Jakob Froberger (1616-1667)
Francesco Maria Piave (1810-1876)
Karl Goldmark (1830-1915)
Ezio Pinza (1892-1947)
Henri Sauguet (1901-1989)
Meredith Willson (1902-1984)
Sir Clifford Curzon (1907-1982)
Perry Como (1912-2001)
Boris Christoff (1914-1993)
Mikko Heiniö (1948)

and

Omar Khayyam (1048-1131)
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Walter Gropius (1883-1969)
Frank Capra (1897-1991)
Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991)
Tina Fey (1970)

Today's Birthdays

Erik Satie (1866-1925)
Werner Egk (1901-1983)
Sandor Vegh (1905-1997)
Birgit Nilsson (1918-2005)
Dennis Brain (1921-1957)
Peter Mennin (1932-1983)
Taj Mahal (Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr.) (1942)
Paul Crossley (1944)
Brian Rayner Cook (1945)
Bill Bruford (1949)
Ivor Bolton (1958)

and

Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957)
Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959)
Gary Paulsen (1939-2021)

and from the New Music Box:

On May 17, 1846, Belgian-born instrument builder and clarinetist Adolphe Sax patents the saxophone, an instrument that would have a profound impact on American jazz. Over a century later, on May 17, 1957, a computer was used to make music for the first time.

Today's Birthdays

Richard Tauber (1891-1948)
Ivan Vishnegradsy (1893-1979)
Jan Kiepura (1902-1966)
Woody Herman (1913-1987)
Liberace (1919-1987)
Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000)
Betty Carter (1930-1998)
Donald Martino (1931-2005)
Robert Fripp (1946)
Monica Huggett (1953)
Andrew Litton (1959)

and

Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799)
Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866)
Louis "Studs" Terkel (1912-2008)
Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

and from the New Music Box:

On May 16, 1907, Miller Reese Hutchison filed an application at the U.S. Patent Office for his invention, the motor-driven Diaphragm Actuated Horn and Resonator, for use in automobiles. The patent was granted on May 3, 1910. The carhorn would later be used as a musical instrument by numerous composers ranging from George Gershwin in An American in Paris (1928) to Wendy Mae Chambers who developed a Car Horn Organ in 1983.

Today's Birthdays

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)
Michael William Balfe (1808-1870)
Sigurd Raschèr (1907-2001)
Lars-Erik Larsson (1908-1986)
Arthur Berger (1912-2003)
John Lanchbery (1923-2003)
Ted Perry (1931-2003)
Richard Wilson (1941)
Brian Eno (1948)

and

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919)
Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931)
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980
Peter Shaffer (1926-2016)
Jasper Johns (1930)
Laura Hillenbrand (1967)

and from The New Music Box:

On May 15, 1972, the Concord Quartet premiered George Rochberg's String Quartet No. 3 at Alice Tully Hall in New York City. Rochberg, an established serialist composer, shocked the compositional scene by returning to tonality in this composition. Many cite this premiere as the birth of neo-romanticism.

Composer Elaina Stupper talks about her music - plus a mini review of PYP Camerata concert

My conversation with Stuppler along with a mini review of a concert that featured two of her pieces is now up and available on Oregon Arts Watch here.

Today's Birthdays

Otto Klemperer (1885-1973)
Sidney Bechet (1897-1959)
Lou Harrison (1917-2003)
Aloys Kontarsky (1931-2017)
Peter Skellern (1947-2017)
Maria de La Pau (1950)
Helen Field (1951)
David Byrne (1952)

and

Hal Borland (1900-1978)
Mary Morris (1947)

Today's Birthdays

Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900)
Constantin Silverstri (1913-1969)
William Schwann (1913-1998)
Gareth Morris (1920-2007)
Ritchie Valens (1941-1959)
Jane Glover (1949)
Stevie Wonder (1950)
David Hill (1957)
Tasmin Little (1965)

and

Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989)
Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989)
Kathleen Jamie (1962)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1875, the American premiere of J.S. Bach's "Magnificat" took place during the May Festival in Cincinnati, conducted by Theodore Thomas. The Cincinnati Commercial review of May 14 was not favorable: "The work is difficult in the extreme and most of the chorus abounds with rambling sub-divisions. We considering the ‘Magnifcat' the weakest thing the chorus has undertaken . . . possessing no dramatic character and incapable of conveying the magnitude of the labor that has been expended upon its inconsequential intricacies. If mediocrity is a mistake, the ‘Magnifcat' is the one error of the Festival". Thomas also conducted the next documented performance in Boston on Mar. 1, 1876 (for which composer John Knowles Paine performed as organ accompanist to a chorus of 300).

Today's Birthdays

Johann Baptist Wanha (Vanhal) (1739-1813)
Franz Anton Hoffmeister (1754-1812)
Giovanni Viotti (1755-1824)
Jules Massenet (1842-1912)
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Sir Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989)
Burt Bacharach (1928-2023)
Lajos Balogh (1931)
Anthony Newman (1941)
Dalmacio Gonzalez (1945)
Doris Soffel (1948)
Jory Vinikour (1963)

and

Edward Lear (1812-1888)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)
Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)
Rosellen Brown (1939)

Today's Birthdays

Jan Václav (1791-1825)
Anatoly Liadov (1855-1914)
Alma Gluck (1884-1938)
Irving Berlin (1888-1989)
William Grant Still (1895-1978)
Robert Johnson (1911-1938)
Ross Pople (1945)
Judith Weir (1954)
Cecile Licad (1961)

and

Martha Graham (1894-1991)
Mari Sandoz (1896-1966)
Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Francisco "Paco" Umbral (1932-2007)

Today's Birthdays

Jean‑Marie Leclair (1697-1764)
Max Steiner (1888-1971)
Dmitri Tiomkin (1894-1979)
Maybelle Carter (1909-1978)
Artie Shaw (1910-2004)
Richard Lewis (1914-1990)
Milton Babbitt (1916-2011)
Maxim Shostakovich (1938)
Lori Dobbins (1958)

and

Karl Barth (1886-1968)
Fred Astaire (1899-1987)
Barbara Taylor Bradford (1933)

and from The New Music Box:

On May 10, 1987, David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe produced the first-ever Bang on a Can Marathon, a twelve-hour concert at the SoHo gallery Exit Art combining music by Milton Babbitt, Steve Reich, John Cage, George Crumb, Lois V Vierk, Lee Hyla, Aaron Kernis, Phill Niblock and others.

Today's Birthdays

Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816)
Adolph von Henselt (1814-1889)
Jacques Singer (1910-1980)
Carlo Maria Giulini (1914-2005)
Nigel Douglas (1929-2023)
Billy Joel (1949)
Michel Beroff (1950)
Joy Harjo (1951)
Linda Finnie (1952)
Anne Sofie von Otter (1955)
Alison Hagley (1961)

and

James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937)
Alan Bennett (1934)
Charles Simic (1938-2023)

Today's Birthdays

Carl Philipp Stamitz (1745-1801)
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869)
Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981)
Heather Harper (1930-2019)
Carlo Cossutta (1932-2000)
Keith Jarrett (1945)
Felicity Lott (1947)

and

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)
Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)
Gary Snyder (1930)
Thomas Pynchon (1937)
Roddy Doyle (1958)

Today's Birthdays

Carl Heinrich Graun (1704-1759)
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Anton Seidl (1850-1898)
Edmond Appia (1894-1961)
Elisabeth Soderstrom (1927-2009)
Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981)
Philip Lane (1950)
Robert Spano (1961)

and

Olympe de Gouge (1748-1793)
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1962)
Angela Carter (1940-1992)
Peter Carey (1943)

and from The New Music Box:

On May 7, 1946, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering is founded with about 20 employees. The company, later renamed Sony, would eventually invent the home video tape recorder, the Walkman and the Discman, as well as take-over Columbia Records, later CBS Records, which under the leadership of composer Goodard Lieberson (1956-1973) released numerous recordings of music by American composers.
and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1824, Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 ("Choral") was premiered at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna, with the deaf composer on stage beating time, but with the performers instructed to follow the cues of Beethoven's assistant conductor, Michael Umlauf.

Today's Birthdays

William Walker (1809-1875)
Jascha Horenstein (1898-1973)
George Perle (1915-2009)
Godfrey Ridout (1918-1984)
Murry Sidlin (1940)
Ghena Dimitrova (1941-2005)
Nathalie Stutzmann (1965)
Teddy Abrams (1987)

and

Robert Peary (1856-1920)
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Gaston Leroux (1868-1927)
Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)
Orson Wells (1915-1985)

Today's Birthdays

Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819-1872)
Hans Pfizner (1869-1947)
Maria Caniglia (1905-1979)
Louis Kaufman (1905-1994)
Kurt Böhme (1908-1989)
Charles Rosen (1927-2012)
Mark Ermler (1932-2002)
Tammy Wynette (1942-1998)
Bunita Marcus (1952)
Cédric Tiberghien (1975)

and

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Nellie Bly (1864-1922)
Christopher Morley (1890-1957)
James Beard (1903-1985)
Kaye Gibbons (1960)

From the New Music Box:

On May 5, 1891, Walter Damrosch led the New York Philharmonic in the very first concert in the large auditorium at Carnegie Hall, now called Stern Auditorium. The program consisted entirely of European repertoire: Beethoven’s "Leonore Overture No. 3," Berlioz’s "Te Deum," Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky "Festival Coronation March" (with the composer making a guest appearance on the podium), the hymn "The Old One Hundred" and "My Country 'Tis of Thee" (then America's unofficial national anthem although the tune is that of the British anthem "God Save The Queen").

This was not actually the first concert in the building, however. On April 1, Liszt-pupil Franz Rummel had already given an all-European solo piano recital in the space that now holds Zankel Hall. The oldest known program for the third of Carnegie's stages, what is now called Weill Recital Hall, a chamber music concert produced by the Society for Ethical Culture, dates back to October 31, 1891 and included the song "At Twilight" by the American composer Ethelbert Nevin.

Today's Birthdays

Marianne (Anna Katharina) von Martínez (1744-1812)
Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731)
Emil Nikolaus Von Reznicek (1860-1945)
Mátyás Seiber (1905-1960)
Tatiana Nikolayeva (1924-1993)
Roberta Peters (1930-2017)
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky (1931-2018)
Marisa Robles (1937)
Enrique Batiz (1942)
Peter Ware (1951)

and

Horace Mann (1796-1859)
Frederick Church (1826-1900)
Graham Swift (1949)
David Guterson (1956)

Today's Birthdays

Alessandro Stradella (1639-1682)
Richard D'Oyly Carte (1844-1901)
Marcel Dupré (1886-1971)
Bing Crosby (1903-1977)
Sir William Glock (1908-2000)
Léopold Simoneau (1916-2006)
Pete Seeger (1919-2014)
John Lewis (1920-2001)
James Brown (1933-2006)
Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012)

and

Niccol Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Jacob Riis (1849-1914)
May Sarton (1912-1995)
William Inge (1913-1973)
Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000)

From the New Music Box:

On May 3, 1943, William Schumann received the very first Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Secular Cantata No. 2 - A Free Song, a work published by G. Schirmer and premiered by the Harvard Glee Club, the Radcliffe Choral Society, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky on March 26, 1943.

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1971, debut broadcast of National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" was made with an electronic theme by composer Don Voegeli of the University of Wisconsin (In 1974, Voegeli composed a new electronic ATC theme, the now-familiar signature tune of the program).

Review of Eugene Symphony concert published in Oregon Arts Watch

I drove to Eugene to hear the Eugene Symphony. My review of the concert has been posted in Oregon Arts Watch here.

Today's Birthdays

Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725)
Jean‑Baptiste Barrière (1707-1747)
Ludwig August Lebrun (1752-1790)
Hans Christian Lumbye (1810-1874)
Carl Michael Ziehrer (1843-1922)
Lorenz Hart (1894-1943)
Alan Rawstorne (1905-1971)
Jean‑Marie Auberson (1920-2004)
Arnold Black (1923-2000)
Horst Stein (1928-2008)
Philippe Herreweghe (1947)
Valery Gergiev (1953)
Elliot Goldenthal (1954)

and

Jerome K Jerome (1859-1927)
Dr. Benjamin Spock (1904-1998)

Review: Lazarova and Oregon Symphony thrill with Lutosławski and Beethoven

Bulgarian conductor Delyana Lazarova has been a hot ticket in the musical world for the past few years, nabbing a couple of choice principal guest conducting positions with the Utah Symphony and the BBC Scottish Symphony. I have read some enthusiastic reviews of her work with other orchestras, and I looked at her schedule. Shes is travelling all over the place with conducting gigs in Spain, Germany, Bulgaria, England (BBC Proms), Brazil, and the U.S. (Aspen Festival) over the summer. So I was eager to witness her on the podium with the Oregon Symphony. That wish was fulfilled on April 25 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall when she led the local band in works by Lutosławski, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven, and I am happy to say that Lazarova is the real deal.

It was the opening number, Lutosławski’s “Little Suite for Orchestra,” that stole the show. This relatively short (eleven minutes), four-movement piece received a magically fun performance from the orchestra. Zachariah Galatis’s piccolo sounded a delightfully carefree against a lovely harp-like underlayment from the strings. The orchestra wonderfully shifted to an unrelenting propulsive gear that was joyful. Karen Wagner’s oboe elicited a folk song quality, and Lazarova got the ensemble to build tension before releasing it. Overall, the piece sparkled like a polished gem.

Next came Simone Porter, the orchestra’s artist-in-residence, replacing saxophonist Steven Banks, who withdrew from the concert had been scheduled to play Billy Childs “Diaspora: Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra.” Banks’ cancellation occurred a few days after the pianist Daniel Trifonov cancelled his performance with the orchestra. A friend of mine wrote to me to ask if something weird was going on. I replied that I didn’t think anything unusual was happening, but it was truly odd. Over the many years that I have reviewed the orchestra, I have not seen two cancellations in a row until now.

Simone Porter took Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto at an extremely fast pace. She didn’t linger anywhere in the piece. She executed all of the quicksilver runs flawlessly, but it seemed that she would have been given a speeding ticket – especially for her quicksilver fingerwork in the last movement. It was amazing to behold, yet her lightening-fast agiltiy didn’t allow the music to breathe, and it all became somewhat dry and somewhat devoid of emotion.

Nevertheless, the audience gave Porter a standing ovation, and she responded with the third movement (“Sarabanda”) from Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor. This time her playing had more gracefulness and a calming effect.

In the second half of the program, Lazarova and the orchestra delivered a thrilling interpretation of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. It offered scintillating sforzandos, true pianissimos, and gentle flowing themes. In the fast-moving final movement, the strings created the effect of a flock of birds flying by and Principal Bassoonist Carin Miller equaled that by giving an effervescent and dance-like kick to a devilishly tricky passage.

Lazarova is an electrifying conductor who has a great future ahead of her. It would be wonderful to see her back on the podium at the Schnitz again in the near future.

P.S. One of the cool things about this concert was the introduction that reminds the audience to turn off their cell phones. This is usually a recording in English with Fred Child’s voice followed by violinist Inés Voglar Belgique giving the reminder in Spanish (she is a native of Venezuela). But this time around, we heard the voice of double-bassist Mariya-Andoniya Andonova, who is from Bulgaria. She spoke in Bulgarian, and there were audible gasps from a large contingent of Bulgarian visitors who were very surprised to hear their own language. That really helped to set the tone for the evening, and at the end of the concert, the Bulgarian contingent gave Lazarova a bouquet of flowers – something that you rarely see in Portland.

Today's Birthdays

Marco da Gagliano (1582-1643)
William Lawes (1602-1645)
Sophia Dussek (1775-1831)
Hugo Alfvén (1872-1960)
Leo Sowerby (1895-1968)
Jón Leifs (1899-1968)
Walter Susskind (1913-1980)
Gary Bertini (1927-2005)
Judy Collins (1939)

and

Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
Joseph Heller (1923-1999)
Bobbie Ann Mason (1940)